Dear scattered and distracted Mom, an interview with Laney Homan

As moms we can easily feel scattered, like all the different responsibilities we have are pulling us in different directions, and like there’s never enough time to get it all done.

Homeschool moms especially can struggle with this because they have the all the schooling duties in addition keeping the home running.

When we aim for completion rather than faithfulness we can get sucked down into resenting the work in front of us. The room you just cleaned needs cleaned again, and the laundry will never be forever done.

Changing our goal to being faithful in our work rather than being done with our work is such a helpful shift.

Laney Homan is a wife of 25 years and mother to eight children ages 6 to 23, and works from home as the member success manager for Your Morning Basket. She homeschools her five youngest kids who are elementary through high-school aged, and knows what it feels like to have a lot to keep track of. Some of her favorite things are reading and visiting her local coffee shop. And today she joins us with words of encouragement for the Mom who feels scattered and overwhelmed. 

What would you say to a Mom who feels scattered during her day? 

Physically writing things down is really helpful for me. Just seeing the obligations and and plans for the upcoming week, or for today is so much more useful than having a digital plan on my phone. So having a paper planner and transferring the things from my phone to that 

Another favorite strategy is to sit down every week and just take a good look at what’s coming up. And since unexpected things will always come up, being able to flex and change plans is also essential. 

Especially when you have older kids in your family that have their own schedules and obligations, communication is key. And once you’ve done a weekly review and have all the pieces straight in your own head, it becomes much easier to keep the rest of your family up to date on what’s going on. 

What strategies do you use to keep the home running smoothly? 

It’s definitely looked different over the years, and lately Simplified Organization has been very helpful in making my boom and bust cycles less dramatic. 

The last couple months have been particularly weird and out of the ordinary for our family, so our usual right now doesn’t really look like what I would plan. 

We’ve found having set routines in place to be very important. When my older kids were younger we had a more organized chore system where everyone had their own things that they were responsible, but these days we just have a tidying time, before Dad gets home from work, and everyone just pitches in and helps.

It’s great to have the set repetition of something that happens every day, and it’s nice to be able to work all together. And when we all clean together it’s easier for me to keep and eye on it too. So instead of relying on charts I just assign tasks in the moment depending on what needs done.

As you have older kids, they get better and better at seeing what needs done themselves. If we can get the main rooms pulled back together every afternoon, that just makes the evening so much more restful and really helps with feeling less scattered and stressed. 

How can we stay cheerful and focused on what’s important?

The goal is faithfulness, not completion. You can’t do all the laundry and have it stay done, or tidy the house and have it stay tidy. The goal of doing dishes is not so you will never have to do dishes again, but to be faithful in your work and bless the people around us. When we’re aiming for completion, we will constantly be frustrated when that task we just did yesterday, or five minutes ago, needs to be done again.

But if our aim is to be faithful in our duty to God and our family, we can appreciate and be grateful for that work, instead of resenting it. The people you have to feed, and the house you have to clean, and the dishes you have to wash are all blessings from God.

Every single one of the different callings and duties you have are from God, and they are given to you for your good. It’s easy to push faithfulness out into the future, to commit to doing that thing tomorrow, or tackling that task next month, but we are called to faithfulness now, in our attitude and in our actions. 

God knows when your life is going to go off the rails, and unexpected things are going to surprise you, and those things are part of his plan too. Even when the world is falling down around your ears, you always have the option to be faithful in the moment, to be cheerful, to obey quickly. And even when you have so many obligations and responsibilities you can be faithful in choosing to do the next thing in front of you. 

And since God sends us different things to deal with, some days you can be faithful, and the house not get cleaned. Maybe there was a different need, and you had to drop everything to go be faithful in that way, but that doesn’t mean you weren’t being faithful. 

Being able to reorganize our responsibilities and actually focus on the most important thing is essential. Every single thing that you are responsible for is not the most important thing to get done right now. 

We need to be intentional in the day to day decisions that we make, but also recognize that in the big picture God knew everything before it happened, and everything is always in his control.